Railway End Table Powered By Hand Crank

March 5, 2026 by 1 Comment

Most end tables that you might find in a home are relatively static objects. However, [Peter Waldraff] of Tiny World Studios likes to build furniture that’s a little more interesting. Thus came about this beautiful piece with a real working railway built right in.

The end table was built from scratch, with [Peter] going through all the woodworking steps required to assemble the piece. The three-legged wooden table is topped with a tiny N-scale model railway layout, and you get to see it put together including the rocks, the grass, and a beautiful epoxy river complete with a bridge. The railway runs a Kato Pocket Line trolley, but the really neat thing is how it’s powered.

[Peter] shows us how a small gearmotor generator was paired with a bridge rectifier and a buck converter to fill up a super capacitor that runs the train and lights up the tree on the table. Just 25 seconds of cranking will run the train anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes depending on if the tree is lit as well. To top it all off, there’s even a perfect coaster spot for [Peter]’s beverage of choice.

It’s a beautiful kinetic sculpture and a really fun way to build a small model railway that fits perfectly in the home. We’ve featured some other great model railway builds before, too.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Beginner’s Guide To Split Keyboards

March 5, 2026 by 5 Comments

Curious about split keyboards, but overwhelmed by the myriad options for every little thing? You should start with [thehaikuza]’s excellent Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards.

Three different split keyboards.
Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit
Your education begins with the why, so you can skip that if you must, but the visuals are a nice refresher on that front.

He then gets into the types of keyboards — you got your standard row-staggered rectangles that we all grew up on, column-staggered, and straight-up ortholinear, which no longer enjoy the popularity they once did.

At this point, the guide becomes a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you want a split but don’t want to learn to change much if at all about your typing style, keep reading, because there are definitely options.

But if you’re ready to commit to typing correctly for the sake of ergonomics, you can skip the Alice and other baby ergo choices and get your membership to the light side. First are features — you must decide what you need to get various jobs done. Then you learn a bit about key map customization, including using a non-QWERTY layout. Finally, there’s the question of buying versus DIYing. All the choices are yours, so go for it!

Via reddit

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A Live ISO For Those Vibe Coding Experiments

March 5, 2026 by 4 Comments

Vibe coding is all the rage at the moment if you follow certain parts of the Internet. It’s very easy to dunk upon it, whether it’s to mock the sea of people who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and want the magic machine to make them a million dollar app with no work, or the vibe coded web apps with security holes you could drive a bus through.

But AI-assisted coding is now a thing that will stick around whether you like it or not, and there are many who want to dip a toe in the water to see what the fuss is about. For those who don’t quite trust the magic machines in their inner sanctum, [jscottmiller] is here with Clix, a bootable live Linux environment which puts Claude Code safely in a sandbox away from your family silver.

Physically it’s a NixOS live USB image with the Sway tiling Wayland compositor, and as he puts it: “Claude Code ready to go”. It has a shared partition for swapping files with Windows or macOS machines, and it’s persistent. The AI side of it has permissive settings, which means the mechanical overlord can reach parts of the OS you wouldn’t normally let it anywhere near; the point of having it in a live environment in the first place.

We can see the attraction of using an environment such as this one for experimenting without commitment, but we’d be interested to hear your views in the comments. It’s about a year since we asked you all about vibe coding, has the art moved forward in that time?

SpyTech: The Underwater Wire Tap

March 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

In the 1970s, the USSR had an undersea cable connecting a major naval base at Petropavlovsk to the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The cable traversed the Sea of Okhotsk, which, at the time, the USSR claimed. It was off limits to foreign vessels, heavily patrolled, and laced with detection devices. How much more secure could it be? Against the US Navy, apparently not very secure at all. For about a decade starting in 1972, the Navy delivered tapes of all the traffic on the cable to the NSA.

Top Secret

You need a few things to make this a success. First, you need a stealthy submarine. The Navy had the USS Halibut, which has a strange history. You also need some sort of undetectable listening device that can operate on the ocean floor. You also need a crew that is sworn to secrecy.

That last part was hard to manage. It takes a lot of people to mount a secret operation to the other side of the globe, so they came up with a cover story: officially, the Halibut was in Okhotsk to recover parts of a Soviet weapon for analysis. Only a few people knew the real mission. The whole operation was known as Operation Ivy Bell.

The Halibut

The Halibut is possibly the strangest submarine ever. It started life destined to be a diesel sub. However, before it launched in 1959, it had been converted to nuclear power. In fact, the sub was the first designed to launch guided missiles and was the first sub to successfully launch a guided missile, although it had to surface to launch.

Oddly enough, the sub carried nuclear cruise missiles and its specific target, should the world go to a nuclear war, was the Soviet naval base at Petropavolvsk.

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The LEGO-lookalike displaying [Paul]'s dashboard

LEGO Space Computer Made Full Size, 47 Years On

March 5, 2026 by 9 Comments

There’s just something delightful about scaled items. Big things shrunk down, like LEGO’s teeny tiny terminal brick? Delightful. Taking that terminal brick and scaling it back to a full-sized computer? Even better. That’s what designer [Paul Staal] has done with his M2x2 project.

In spite of the name, it actually has a Mac Mini M4 as its powerful beating heart. An M2 might have been more on-brand, but it’s probably a case of wanting the most horsepower possible in what [Paul] apparently uses as his main workstation these days. The build itself is simple, but has some great design details. As you probably expected, the case is 3D printed. You may not have expected that he can use the left stud as a volume control, thanks to an IKEA Symfonisk remote hidden beneath. The right stud comes off to allow access to a wireless charger.

The minifigs aren’t required to charge those airpods, but they’re never out of place.

The 7″ screen can display anything, but [Paul] mostly uses it either for a custom home assistant dashboard, or to display an equalizer, both loosely styled after ‘screen’ on the original brick. We have to admit, as cool as it looked with the minifigs back in the day, that sharp angle to the screen isn’t exactly ergonomic for humans.

Perhaps the best detail was putting LEGO-compatible studs on top of the 10:1 scaled up studs, so the brick that inspired the project can sit securely atop its scion. [Paul] has provided a detailed build guide and the STLs necessary to print off a brick, should anyone want to put one of these nostalgic machines on their own desk.

We’ve covered the LEGO computer brick before, but going the other way–putting a microcontroller and display in the brick it to run DOOM. We’ve also seen it scaled up before, but that project was a bit more modest in size and computing power.

Using A Solid-State Elastocaloric Cooler To Freeze Water

March 5, 2026 by 7 Comments

Elastocaloric materials are a class of materials that exhibit a big change in temperature when exposed to mechanical stress. This could potentially make them useful as solid-state replacement for both vapor-compression refrigeration systems and Peltier coolers.

The entire assembled elastocaloric device. (Credit: Guoan Zhou, Nature, 2026)
The entire assembled elastocaloric device. (Credit: Guoan Zhou, Nature, 2026)

So far one issue has been that reaching freezing temperatures was impossible, but a recently demonstrated solution (online PDF via IEEE Spectrum) using NiTi-based shape-memory alloys addressed that issue with a final temperature of -12°C achieved within 15 minutes from room temperature.

In the paper by [Guoan Zhou] et al. the cascade cooler is described, with eight stages of each three tubular, thin-walled NiTi structures. Each of these stages is mechanically loaded by a ceramic head that provides the 900 MPa mechanical stress required to transfer thermal energy via the stages from one side to the other of the device, alternately absorbing or releasing the energy with CaCl2 as the heat-exchange fluid.

NiTi alloys are known as about the ideal type of SMA for this elastocaloric purpose, so how much further this technology can be pushed remains to be seen. For stationary refrigeration applications it might just be the ticket, but we’ll have to see as the technology is developed further.

Running Video Through A Guitar Effects Pedal

March 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

Guitar pedals are designed to take in a sound signal, do fun stuff to it, and then spit it out to your amplifier where it hopefully impresses other people. However, [Liam Taylor] decided to see what would happen if you fed video through a guitar pedal instead. 

The device under test is a Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit. It’s capable of serving up a wide range of effects, from delay to chorus to reverb, along with compression and distortion and a smattering of others. [Liam] hooked up the composite video output from an old Sony camcorder from the 2000s to a 3.5 mm audio jack, and plugged it straight into the auxiliary input of the ME-50 (notably, not the main guitar input of the device).

The multi-effects pedal isn’t meant to work with an analog video signal, but it can pass it through and do weird things to it regardless. Using the volume pedal on the ME-50 puts weird lines on the signal, while using a wah effect makes everything a little wobbly. [Liam] then steps through a whole range of others, like ring modulation, octave effects, and reverb, all of which do different weird things to the visuals. Particularly fun are some of the periodic effects which create predictable variation to the signal. True to its name, the distortion effect did a particularly good job of messing things up overall.

It’s a fun experiment, and recalls us of some of the fantastic analog video synths of years past. Video after the break.

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